IT Application and Tools in Business

Prelims (Microsoft Excel)

Microsoft Excel - a commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft.

It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for platforms and it is a part of Microsoft Office.
- Microsoft Excel became the first spreadsheet to allow the user to define the appearance
of spreadsheets (fonts, character attributes and cell appearance). It also introduced
intelligent cell recomputation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are
updated (previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a
specific user command). Excel has extensive graphing capabilities, and enables users to
perform mail merge.

Earlier Versions of MS Excel

Excel 2.0

Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Mac in September 30 1985, and the first
Windows version (numbered 2.05 to line up with the Mac and bundled with a run-time Windows
environment) in November 1987.

Excel 5.0 – 9.0

Versions 5.0 to 9.0 of Excel contain various Easter Eggs, including a Hall of Tortured Souls.
Although, since Version 10 Microsoft has taken measures to eliminate such undocumented
features from their products.

Excel 2000

One of the most obvious changes introduced with Excel 2000 (and the rest of the Office 2000
suite) involved a clipboard that could hold multiple objects at once. In another noticeable
change the Office Assistant, whose frequent unsolicited appearance in Excel 97 had annoyed
many users, became less intrusive.

Excel 2007

The most obvious change is a completely revamped user interface called the Ribbon Menu
System, which means a user must abandon most habits acquired from previous versions.
Some practical advantages of the new system are greatly improved management of named
variables through the Name Manager, and much improved flexibility in formatting graphs,
which now allow (x, y) coordinate labeling and lines of arbitrary weight.
*** Office Open XML file formats were introduced, including .xlsm for a workbook with
macros and .xlsx for a workbook without macros ***

MS Excel States

Autosave – defined as a timed MS Excel Housekeeping event

Ready state - No commands or macros are being run. No dialog boxes are being displayed.
No cells are being edited and the user is not in the middle of a cut/copy and paste operation.
No embedded object has focus.

Edit mode - The user has started to type valid input characters into an unlocked or
unprotected cell, or has pressed F2 on one or more unlocked or unprotected cells.

Cut/copy and paste mode - The user has cut or copied a cell or range of cells and has not
yet pasted them, or has pasted them using the paste-special dialog box, which enables multiple
paste operations.

Point mode - The user is editing a formula and is selecting cells whose addresses are added to
the formula being edited.

Command Characteristics of MS Excel

 They perform actions in the same way that users do.

 They can do anything a user can do such as altering Excel settings, opening, closing,
and editing documents, initiating recalculations, and so on.

 They can be set up to be called when certain trapped events occur.

 They can display dialog boxes and interact with the user.

 They can be linked to control objects so that they are called when some action is taken
on that object, such as left-clicking.

 They are never called by Excel during a recalculation.

 They cannot be called by functions during a recalculation.

Functions in MS Excel

 They usually take arguments and always return a result.

 They can be entered into one or more cells as part of an Excel formula.

 They can be used in defined name definitions.

 They can be used in conditional formatting limit and threshold expressions.

 They can be called by commands.

 They cannot call commands.

MS Excel Worksheet Functions

 They cannot access macro sheet information functions.

 They cannot obtain the values of uncalculated cells.

 They can be written and registered as thread-safe starting in Excel 2007.

MS Excel Macro-Sheet Functions

 They can access macro sheet information functions.

 They can obtain the values of uncalculated cells including the values of the calling cells.

 They are not considered thread safe starting in Excel 2007.